Back in October of last year, Atari CEO Wade Rosen made headlines after suggesting in an interview with the gaming YouTube channel MinnMax that the company was willing to accept pitches for a new Bubsy game after re-acquiring the IP.
This inevitably led to a bunch of pitches from indie developers, including one interesting prototype from the Frog Nimble developer Jon D (who claimed he sadly never got a reply from the publisher).
Here at Time Extension, we recently had the chance to talk to Rosen in an interview that is now up on the site and during that conversation, the topic once again turned to the ill-fated Bobcat, with the CEO reiterating the company's intention to make a good Bubsy game:
"We’re going to do something great with Bubsy, right? That’s something that we really aspire to do. Do we want to be the group that made a great Bubsy game? Yeah, we want to be that group. Because that would be really cool.
Out of curiosity, we, therefore, asked Rosen whether Atari had been in contact with any developers following that initial call for pitches and whether those conversations had actually gone anywhere. Here's what he had to say:
"So, more to follow on that one, but yes! And apologies, if people didn’t hear back from the team. We were probably still processing at that point. The response was much greater than we had anticipated from that and so there was a lot to digest. But the short answer is one way or another, we’re going to find a way to move forward with a Bubsy project, and that most likely will have been the result of something that came out from that and that general request for proposals."
In other words, it looks like we might be seeing the return of the mascot in the future, and that it will likely be a result of Rosen's appearance on MinnMax.
You can read our full interview with Rosen at this link.